I was the headteacher of North Waltham primary school in Hampshire, whose original flint-knapped Victorian school buildings are Grade II listed. When extensions were needed in the 1970s, the county architect, Sir Colin Stansfield Smith, commissioned a design from a Winchester architect that complemented the original, repeating the flint-knapping, with brick and pine interiors that offered low maintenance and had a domestic scale and a humanity that were a million miles from the system-built horrors perpetrated in many other parts of England.

The result was a unique set of spaces in which it was a joy and privilege for staff and pupils to work. Stansfield Smith oversaw the building of numerous schools across Hampshire which were innovative, attractive and, perhaps surprisingly, far from extravagant in cost. Would that today's government could see the benefits of his kind of approach.